Hacker News Reader

Comment by antoncohen | Hacker News Reader

That comment was taken out of context. Wired wrote an entire article about an offhand remark.

I was at ChefConf, the comment was made during a panel discussion on open source [1]. On the panel there was an engineer from Facebook, an IT Director from Gap, and Mark Russinovich the CTO of Azure (note Azure, not Windows).

The conversation went something like this (paraphrasing):

Moderator: "Microsoft used to really suck, and they were really anti-open source. But now they are open sourcing things like CLR on GitHub. I bet one thing they will never open source is Windows."

Mark: "You never know, it's definitely possible. Crazy stuff happens."

Nothing more on the subject.

[1] https://chefconf2015a.sched.org/event/00710f4fed0e8b617aef56...

View on HN

I was also there, and I had a similar reaction to seeing the Wired article. (Sensationalist, whole article written on a 30-second exchange, click-bait, etc.)

That said, here's how I remember it:

1. Metz: ... would Microsoft ever open source Windows?

2. Crowd: Cheers. Applause. People shouting "Do it!"

3. Russinovich: You never know, it's definitely possible. Crazy stuff happens.

I found the middle part more interesting than anything else. It's a perilous road to be sure but I think Microsoft may underestimate how much good something like open sourcing Windows could do them.

I believe all the talks were filmed. Hopefully the video gets posted.

While I do appreciate the context, simply putting Mark Russinovich in a box that says he is an Azure guy, ignores history. He is probably one of, if not the most authoritative Windows person on the planet. He chose to do Azure fabric stuff because at his level, you get your pick of interesting projects. Taking the Windows code base and moving to to cloud scale was probably a pretty unique challenge.

So yes, while open sourcing windows would be a massive undertaking involving nearly every level of management and buy in at Microsoft - Mark R would carry a big stick in such a discussion.

> Mark Russinovich the CTO of Azure (note Azure, not Windows).

I agree with everything you said, but it's important to note here that Russinovich is a well-known Windows reverse engineer, the founder of SysInternals, and the author of the Windows Internals books (these are akin to the Design & Implementation of BSD books, but for Windows).

He's something of a deity amongst Windows kernel hackers. I also believe he pops on HN now and again.

So what you're saying is that the conversation didn't go like:

Moderator: "I bet you won't open source Windows."

Mark "Hey we could open source Windows! Hell we might even do it during the launch of Windows 10 winkwink. You never know winkwink. winkwink"

Interestingly, it's not just Wired taking it out of context– Metz (the moderator) is actually the author of this piece.

But there was also a follow-on quote attributed to Mark in the Wired piece:

"If you open source something but it comes with a build system that takes rocket scientists and three months to set up, what’s the point?"

When was that said? Or was it? That would be something that is a blocker to adoption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com